Thor Among the Giants. Part VI: The Omega Point

Regular God is such a nut. He made everything, he knows everything, he sees everything, but he spends most of his time acting the part of a cosmic policeman, patrolling the humanity beat, bullying us into good behavior with outrageous threats of eternal damnation and torment. You’d think divinity would find something more exciting to do, or would at least have made us better people if he was so intent on high standards. It’s this God, I believe, that Frederick Nietzsche in 1882 declared was dead, though to be fair to organized religion, it seems that Regular God has well outlasted the old philosopher.  

Teilhard de Chardin’s version of divinity is far more plausible. His God is endlessly evolving, or as Henri Bergson put it, is in a state of “a perpetual becoming.” Not for Teilhard is the clockmaker who once upon a time set all things in motion and now sits back to admire his workmanship; to Teilhard the creation is an ongoing process that continues to unfold, and our own creativity is a part of it. Teilhard calls the epicenter of all sacredness the Omega Point, with the idea that if the start of existence was an Alpha point of pure potential then Omega would be the endpoint of actualization. The Omega Point is the “supercentre” of divine energy, simultaneously in and outside of time, or as he puts it, “At the same time that it is the term of the series, it is also outside the series.” It attracts us toward an ecstatic future while at the same time living at the heart of each one of us, the attracted.  

The human project, says Teilhard, is about building the noosphere, the sphere of consciousness around the planet, and once we have evolved a coherent noosphere with its own collective human consciousness, we will move towards uniting with the Omega Point in a fusion of the human with the divine. In this process all of our current preoccupations with materiality, our concerns about sin, our inherited feelings of core worthlessness would dissolve and we would become the ecstasy containers we have always secretly known ourselves to be. We could hardly imagine – or at least Teilhard doesn’t – that at this point the process would then grind to a halt with a Mission Accomplished sign hanging over the galaxies. For Teilhard, we (if we remain recognizably us) would then progress to still more immense unions. This contrasts sharply with the heat death theory of the universe, where, as entropy slowly winds everything down, we all get frozen to the bus stop of time.  

What, Teilhard asks, should we be doing to help move our evolving along?

 Our works? But what in the very interests of life in general is the work of human works if not for each one of us to establish in ourselves an absolutely original centre where the universe is reflected in a unique and inimitable way: precisely our self, our personality? Deeper than all its rays the very focal point of our consciousness is the essential thing for Omega to retrieve if it is to be truly Omega.

                                                                                    The Human Phenomenon

 When “each one of us” establishes “an absolutely original center,” we bring a new uniqueness to the world. Shakespeare is writing more Shakesperean plays, Liszt is playing yet more Lisztian piano, and you and I are cooking our fried eggs in our own “unique and inimitable way.”  My work is to develop more me, your work is to develop more you, so there is more genuine “me-ness” in existence. That’s me as a unique expression of the divine, not me as in “Me Generation.” To use William Blake’s language, we will be developing into our four-fold nature of Eternity, while Herbert Marcuse described it as freeing ourselves from alienation, a disconnection from self and others, and instead becoming at ease with who we are. That surely is exactly what we do when we trip – sorting out who we are and what is important to us, in us. Even the euphoric part of a regular “recreational” drug experience is forwarding humanity’s ecstatic exploration, though this particular euphoria is often condemned as a dead-end of self-indulgence, as if there was something disgraceful about experiencing intense private joy.  

So when all these centres (i.e. people) Teilhard talks about, meet and merge into a coherent noosphere, that noosphere starts to locate itself in relation to a “supercentre” – Omega.

  In every organized whole the parts perfect and fulfill themselves. By failing to grasp this universal law of union, so many kinds of pantheism have led us astray in the worship of a great Whole in which individuals were supposed to become lost like a drop of water, dissolved like a grain of salt in the sea…No, in confluence along the line of their centers, the grains of consciousness do not tend to lose their contours and blend together. On the contrary, they accentuate the depths and incommunicability of their ego. The more together, they become the other, the more they become “themselves.” How could it be otherwise, since they plunge into Omega? Can a centre dissolve? Or rather is it not its own way of dissolving precisely to supercenter itself?

                                                            The Human Phenomenon 

Which makes us think of that old singer of self-songs, Walt Whitman: 

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

                                                            Song of Myself 

And later in the same poem he says: 

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. 

All the paradoxes of the normal tripper! 

The more the grains of consciousness (us) melt into the Omega Point, the more they become their true selves, as we like to say. Teilhard illustrates that with the idea of being in love. When you are in love you feel merged with, “at one” with, your lover, and far from that impeding your own identity, it makes you feel all the more complete and alive. When the beloved is the sacred, the plunging into the other and the feeling fully alive are still more profoundly felt. 

O guiding night!

O night more lovely than the dawn!

O night that has united

the Lover with his beloved,

transforming the beloved in her Lover. 

I abandoned and forgot myself,

I abandoned and forgot myself,

Laying my face on my Beloved;

All things ceased; I went out from myself,

Leaving my cares

Forgotten among the lilies.

                                                Saint John of the Cross  Dark Night of the Soul 

Clearly, Saint John’s dark night of the soul was not the dark night of isolation and abandonment we have turned that phrase into. If there is an ego death here at all, it is one where the ego is consummated – not consumed – in the Beloved. Not a passing away of all I thought myself to be, but a non-violent merging that ends in bliss, not destruction. The beautiful fate of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis: 

 With love of spouse, love of children, love of friends, and to some degree, love of country, we often imagine that we have exhausted the various natural forms of loving. But precisely the most fundamental form of passion is missing from this list, that passion which under the pressure of a universe closing on itself precipitates the elements upon one another in the whole. The passion of cosmic affinity, and as a result the cosmic sense…A love that embraces the entire universe is not only something psychologically possible, it is also the only complete and final way in which we can love.

                                                                                    The Human Phenomenon 

In its first stage, the material stage, evolution was divergent – matter proliferated in complexity from the simplest bacteria and one-celled creatures, to living plants and animals, on to self-conscious beings such as us. With us, Teilhard maintains, evolution has reached a point where it becomes convergent, so that the grains of consciousness – us again – draw together towards the Omega Point in an exultant coming together. The God we merge with is “hyperpersonalized” energy, a sacredness so personal that the closer we approach it the more we realize who we are. It is the same god of whom Meister Eckhart said, “God is nearer to me than I am to myself; he is just as near to wood and stone, but they do not know it.”  It is through this lens of becomingness that we might view our joy and sadness, our accountable and unaccountable depressions – what I see as my disease is part of some larger and more interesting logjam.  

 Rick Doblin of MAPS anticipates a future of “mass mental health”, where psychedelics will sweep through the DSM like a new broom and clear out the depressions, anxieties and addictions that lie in its table of contents. And why shouldn’t this happen if relief of suffering is what we want? But another and more psychedelic goal lurks, one that involves “mass mysticism,” where our current religions, obsessed as they are with sin, social control and killing the heretics and infidels, will be seen to be insufficient. This mass mysticism could help us create a religion of the future, one fit for the upcoming noosphere, where, in Teilhard’s vision, (and ours too, at least when we are tripping) the expansion of love is the whole point of everything, the beginning, middle and the end of the sermon.  

Right you are John, all you do need is love.

 I believe that forming the universal being (species consciousness, Albion, the noosphere) will be based on love, trust and creativity. Love, as Teilhard puts it, is the be-all and end-all of our evolving; trust, through self-trust, our capacity to trust others and our own trustworthiness will produce the level of human connectedness needed to move us into a future of organized coherence; and it is the fun of creativity that makes us the playful, openly intelligent creatures who stay interested in all this evolving. From these three qualities the fronds of our evolution peek out and announce their magic.

 The Omega Point had a brief flash of celebrity when Teilhard was first published in the sixties and seventies, but then, along with a lot of other far-out thinking and art, it was firmly put on the back burner as we resumed politics, money and business as usual. It was Terence Mckenna who a couple of decades later reincarnated the idea as the transcendental object at the end of time:

 Based on 25 years of this stuff and a lot of reading and a lot of head scratching, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a transcendental object ahead of us in time, you could call it God, you could call it Jesus, you can call it her, you can call it flying saucers from Zata Reticuli…but whatever you call it, it’s an attractor, it lies ahead of us in the future and all of human history is being channeled toward it, pulled toward it, and I see the entire history of the universe as a journey across a landscape of energy and matter toward union with this transcendental object.

                                    Transcendental Object at the End of Time, YouTube          

 Where Teilhard is studious, poetic and dense, McKenna is performatively whacky. Teilhard predicted that the union with Omega could occur one day, some day; McKenna took the theatrical step of naming the date, which unfortunately was…December 21, 2012. Much sadder is that McKenna died long before the day the world didn’t end. No doubt if he had been there to (not) see that end date, he would have given a wry grin, made a goofy joke about the unreliability of aliens, and reminded us that:

 Everything hangs in the balance, because we are between monkeydom and starshiphood, and in the leap across those 25,000 years energies are released, religions are shot off like sparks, philosophies evolve and die, science arises, magic arises, all these things which control power with greater or lesser degrees of ethical constancy. There is, as in the metaphor of dying, the possibility of mucking it up, of aborting the transformation of the species into a hyperspatial entelechy.   

We are now, there can be no doubt, in the final seconds of that crisis…which involves the end of history, the departure from the planet, the triumph over death, and the release of the individual from magic. We are in fact closing distance with the most profound event planetary ecology can encounter, which is the freeing of life from the dark chrysalis of matter, the old metaphor of psyche as butterfly is a species-wide metaphor. We must undergo a metamorphosis in order to survive the momentum of historical forces already in motion.

                                    Transcendental Object at the End of Time, YouTube 

Just as Teilhard speaks about divergence and convergence in our evolving, McKenna describes us as an “unevolving species,” in that we have replaced physical evolution with the far more agile agents of culture and technology. 

Technology is the real skin of our species. Man, correctly seen in the context of the last 500 years, is the extruder of a technological shell. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization, we put it through mental filters and we extrude Lindisfarne gospels, space shuttles, all of these things. This is what we do. We’re like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects.  

McKenna develops Teilhard’s beautiful proposition that the divine is “radiating from the heart of matter” by pointing out that nature has something of the divine about it, and we are undoubtedly part of nature, even if we simultaneously glorify and mistreat it: 

We all have a model of history, a model of the future, and we all feel capable of stepping into the shoes of our leaders and discharging that responsibility. Well in order to do that we need to overcome our amnesia about how we got to this place. You see, what science would have you believe and explicitly implies is that we are an aberration. Over here you have nature, the beautiful rain forests, the wonderful coral reefs, the symmetry of the humming bird, the sea urchin, the butterfly; and here you have us grimy, tawdry, polluting, ugly, driven, in disequilibrium, in denial.  

I don’t believe that. I believe that this kind of thinking that breaks humanity away from the rest of nature is the first of the great disempowering myths by which the western mind has enslaved itself, and we are not outside of nature, we are not a runaway toxic process, we are not a mutation, we are in fact that part of nature which has been deputized for a purpose. We are the energy-gathering aspect of the Gaian mind, we are the language-forming capacity of nature herself…The main effect of humans on this planet has been to greatly accelerate the speed at which nature has been able to creatively express herself…  

This is what it’s like when a species prepares to move on to the next dimension. The entire destiny of all life on the planet is tied up in this. We are not acting for ourselves or from ourselves; we happen to be the point species in a transformation that will affect every species on this planet at its conclusion.

                                    Transcendental Object at the End of Time, YouTube 

Like Teilhard, McKenna believes in a purposive universe, one that has things in store for us. Teilhard stuck to his guns, and for all the hard times his Catholic superiors gave him, maintained to the end of his days that Catholicism was the best bet for guiding us into this mystical future, even if he had no compelling reasons why. McKenna’s religion of the future does not come out of any of the old allegiances, but is one based on (primarily psychedelic) visionary experiences. Can we be guided by our trippy visions? Yes, if we are willing to play with them with love, trust and creativity:  

 If you think the universe is mundane, if you think there are no more adventures to be had, I’m telling you, you can turn your living room into the bridge of Magellan’s ship on a long Saturday evening with five grams of psilocybin in silent darkness.  

We are living in the most empowering age in human history, because all of the energy of the ancestors, not only the human ancestors, but our animal, our primate ancestors, all that energy pours into, is focused into this moment. We are the transition generation, we have one foot in matter and one foot in hyperspace, and we can redeem the trust of thousands of years, all of the horror of history can be redeemed if we don’t drop the ball – every pogrom, every instance of racial, sexual or minority persecution can be redeemed if we give the human adventure meaning, and we give it meaning by discovering the totality within ourselves and then exemplifying it for each other. And this dissolves boundaries, strengthens the weak, enlightens the strong, and brings hope to all, and this can only be done if we accept the gifts which nature has offered us.

                                    Transcendental Object at the End of Time, YouTube. 2:53 

The primary gift that nature has offered us is life itself, and we accept that offer by experiencing what is going on for us, moment by moment, in as fine a detail as possible, and it is this gift that is instrumental in guiding/luring us towards Omega. As McKenna puts it, this experience, “the felt moment of immediate experience” is our escape hatch from fractured and pained self-consciousness into the wholeness of being that Blake named as four-fold Eternity:  

It isn’t who you were, or what you were, or who you will be or what you will be, it’s the felt moment of immediate experience, and this has been robbed from us by media, and by our tendency to denigrate ourselves, to see the world in terms of the great ones not here – Aristotle, Madonna, Jesus, whatever your particular bent is. The overcoming of neurosis, of unhappiness, of toxic lifestyles is the felt presence of immediate experience, in the body, in the moment. Psychedelics, sexuality, gastronomy, sport, dance, these are the things that put you in the felt presence of the moment.  

And that’s all you really possess, your memories are eroding away, the futures you anticipate will probably not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. It’s not necessarily some kind of be here now feel-good thing, because it doesn’t always feel good, but it always feels, it is a domain of feeling. It’s primary. Language is not primary, ideology is not primary, the propagation of future and past vectors is not primary, what’s primary is the felt presence of experience, and that is the source of love, and that is the source of community.

                                    Transcendental Object at the End of Time, YouTube.  

There is nothing guaranteed about humanity’s happy ending with the Omega/transcendental object, far from it. McKenna says it will only happen “if we don’t drop the ball,” while Teilhard similarly warns it will only take place “if all goes well.” The fossil record shows far more dead-ends and die-offs than floridly successful species, and if we don’t make it, there is plenty of inert matter left lying around for another try. Both thinkers agree that we are poised at an inflection point where we may make the leap into some kind of spiritual hyperspace or just as easily crash and burn ourselves on Spaceship Earth. I hope Exon and Shell are taking note: 

We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.

Terence McKenna This World...and Its Double 

Since the death of both of these visionaries, psychedelics have emerged into unexpected respectability, meaning that the cultural powers that be have focused their beady eyes on their potential. If psychedelics are domesticated into becoming a prime tool in the psychological repair shop of late-stage capitalism then, if all does not go well, these revolutionary, anti-materialistic forces will be co-opted into helping one-dimensional humanity stay in its robotic shell.  

Stressed out bankers, coders and sales managers can be whisked away from the industrial fray, treated for their mysterious depressions, anxieties, addictions and manias, have their mystical moment, and then be returned to the corporate battlefields. Real live soldiers can take their MDMA, get over their PTSD, and also return to the fray. Carolyn Chen in Work Pray Code has described how Silicon Valley has already perverted mindfulness practices into becoming a work-based spirituality, supporting the one true god – becoming a more productive worker. Though psychedelics would most naturally be the solvent of society, disintegrating our most embedded prejudices and cherished assumptions, they can easily be twisted into becoming a coagulant, and by becoming respectable, become dangerous. We carry a responsibility to keep psychedelics unpredictable, undomesticated, unmedicalized and uncommodified, so that we may some day be more that way ourselves. 

Self-improvement can go only so far. A persistent depression, an inexplicable anxiety, an embarrassing addiction you cannot control, are all signs that we have not managed to incorporate the whole of Albion or Christ in us, we need more help in what Teilhard calls noogenesis, the creation of a world soul that we can all knowingly partake in. We look for a Christ who synthesizes horror and doubt into new belief – a holy being possessed by wholeness – while a pure Christ has no wholeness to give us. I cannot lop off my arms and hands in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. You have to take all of lousy me for it to be me! 

Grandmother Christ

Fear of Death Christ

Outdoor Christ

Horror Christ

Worm Christ

Christ of our Supreme Laziness,

Eat our sins

And find their nourishment

For your next incarnation.

Until that time

We will hold back terror

With our ridiculous incantations.

Ruined Christ

Dancing Christ

Makeshift Christ

Fake Christ

Dead And Alive Christ

Forgive us our triumphs,

Guide us past the shoals

Of righteousness,

Remember our longing eyes

As we cast you onto the rocks

Of our lockjaw religions.

 What we call ‘mental’ illness is just one of our terrified incantations against the unbearable abyss of truth, as we cling frog-like to the one-dimensional world that William Blake called Ulro. The conventional treatments our society offers can only substitute our stricken posture with congenial disguises, a re-immersion into convention, an amazing makeover of outworn habits. There is no lift-off there. We are not here to scrub our behavioral health clean with bars of mental hygiene soap, we are here in our livid humanity, gazing as best we can upon truth, to further the cause of love. In the words of W.B. Yeats:  

Now that my ladder's gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

                                                W.B. Yeats